Come Together

We’re on a collision course with Opening Day, and the bad news is that at this point it looks like Opening Day will win. But there is a bright spot!

While beta testing the new Seasons feature on real-world data, we discovered that some users had worked around the lack of seasons by naming related teams with the year (e.g. “San Francisco Giants 2015”, “San Francisco Giants 2014”, etc.) We also found cases where the same player appeared twice, usually when they had switched teams and the user created a new player rather than selecting the old one.

In both cases, it would be cool if it were possible to merge entities (player, teams, leagues) into something that was treated as a single entry by the app — especially in the future when stats are turned on.

Our most fundamental design principle is that if Apple has solved something that is needed by Home Field ScorebooK, then we will do it Apple’s way. Fortunately, Apple has implemented linked contacts since iOS 7.0. The way that it works is that, when editing a contact, you can link contacts into what looks like a single unified card. In the details view of the unified card, the original contacts are preserved and can be unlinked. One contact is chosen for the name of the unified card, but you can change which one by drilling down into the original contacts.

An interesting side effect of Apple’s implementation is that changing the name on the original card will update the name on the unified card, but changing the name on the unified card will update all of the linked contacts!

I’m happy to announce that linked players, teams and leagues will be supported in Home Field ScorebooK version 2016.1.0 (whenever that is — watch this space!) emulating all of the behaviors of Apple’s linked contacts.